Most industrial telecommunications hardware is housed in standardized equipment racks that contain individual circuit board components. These circuit boards can perform a myriad of high-bandwidth operations and require high speed connections to other hardware elements or the network that they are serving. To provide these connections, small form factor ports are often employed in telecommunications hardware; the ports provide for optical or electromagnetic connections to be made between various hardware components or other communication lines by accepting a standardized plug at the end of an optical or copper wire to be inserted and form a connection to the attached hardware. Small form factor ports are typically configured in rows or columns to take advantage of their lower profile compared to other legacy methods of interconnection and can drastically increase the density of physical interconnections possible for a given circuit board size.